Religion: My faith is the primary focus of my life, influencing each part of me. I have been forgiven, cleansed, and empowered by Jesus Christ. Without him, I am a very thoughtful, competent idiot. With him, I am all I need to be, all I could ever hope for. I oppose institutional religious stagnation, but getting together with others is a good idea. God is real. Jesus Christ is his Son, and the Bible is true. Faith is not human effort. It's human choice. I try to be the most listening, understanding, and generous person I can.

I invited friends to visit me one evening this week. I am going to play them a movie. We are going to eat dinner. We are going to talk. I know the ideological underpinnings of the movie; I know the conversation we are going to talk. I want their opinion, want to add their talk to my own. I want them to create an opinion and expect that in doing so, they will shift their patterns of thought toward mine.

They are interested in each other. I am interested in their interest in each other. This will bring them together, create a memory, perhaps an ideology, which brings them together, to some degree, in mind and purpose.

** * **

Notice how spare descriptions of ordinary events make them seem insidious. In Woolf, they often seem to suggest an unbalanced nature.